Supercharge your organization with everyday kaizen

You are on your lean journey. You’ve developed the skills to identify the need for, get ready for, conduct, and follow up a formal kaizen event. That is a great part of the foundation for your lean journey, but there must be more to improving the business. There absolutely is more—and it’s called everyday kaizen.

Everyday Kaizen Versus a Kaizen Event

Think of a kaizen event as a project that starts and stops at a certain time. A five-day kaizen event starts on Monday and ends on Friday. It has a specific scope and expectation outlined in the project charter, along with a certain amount of pomp and circumstance driven by the formality of the process.

The formal kaizen event is critical early in your lean journey when you are trying to get traction. Recognized for their efforts, a small team works to resolve (at least to some extent) a business problem. The entire affair sends a message to the organization that we are “doing something.” In short, you are kick-starting the improvement process. A kaizen event also is critical later in the lean journey, when you are attempting to solve a significant and specific business or operational problem.

Still, a kaizen event involves only some of the people some of the time. Eventually, though, you’ll need to provide a way for everyone to be actively involved in the lean journey every day. As valuable as the kaizen event is, it’s periodic, it can’t involve everyone, and it doesn’t address the details of everyone’s work process quickly. This is where everyday kaizen plays a critical role.

What Is Everyday Kaizen?

Everyday kaizen (EK) involves everyone, from the front office through production all the way to shipping. It should cover just about all your employees. EK is about employees making frequent improvements that connect their jobs with jobs performed upstream and downstream.

Most such improvements are small, seemingly inconsequential when compared to the improvements achieved by kaizen events and other, more formalized projects—but this misses the point. What if every employee makes two or three improvements to his or her work process every week? All of those EK improvements add up quickly. Taken together, they have greater impact than the changes that come from formal kaizen events. If every employee has the fundamental knowledge of muda (waste), feels empowered to look for and act on improvements, and has the support of their supervisors to make a change, then the sky is the limit.

Knowledge and Empowerment

To take EK seriously, employees need to have knowledge and they have to be empowered. Let’s start with knowledge. At a minimum, they need basic training in the eight wastes—defects, overproducing, overprocessing, inventory, motion, transportation, waiting, and underutilized human talent—and they need to understand the idea of value-added and non-value-added activities. Ideally, they should learn the basics by attending training sessions in small cross-functional groups. These sessions should include a muda walk where the trainees go to gemba (where the work takes place) to look for examples of each of the wastes. They then translate what they see into value-added or non-value-added activities. They then come back and report what they saw and how all those activities affect operations. This is learning by doing … one of the best ways for adults to learn.

As for empowerment, leaders set the tone. They must communicate messages that say everyone, from the executive suite to the front line, is empowered, supported, and expected to look for ways to make their work processes better. This can include sending cascading messages from leadership to front-line supervision, lead people, and, ultimately, the front-line employee; conducting monthly all-hands meetings to reinforce and share examples of EK results; and describing the “whats and hows” of EK in your company newsletter.

Supercharge your communications. To recognize those who make a difference, let employees with EK ideas be a presenter at all-hands meetings or be the author of a newsletter article.

Small Changes, Big Results

When employees take a critical look at what they do every day, what do they see? Let’s start with the production assembler. Standing at his workstation, he sees the item to be assembled as well as a fixture and a dedicated space for the assembly task. He sees tools, parts, prints, and work instructions. He thinks of the eight wastes and about value-added and non-value-added activities, and opportunities begin to emerge.

He rearranges his tools in a sequence that makes it easier to reach during assembly. He notices how parts arrive at his assembly station, then rearranges them to ensure everything is in the right orientation—something that takes a minute but ends up shaving three to five minutes off the assembly time. Sure, he’s saving only a minute or two, but again, those small gains add up.

Finally, he looks at the prints he receives and the work instructions. He talks with his co-workers and colleagues and asks, Could the job number be placed in large type, and could a reference drawing appear just below it? Such small changes would make the job packet just a little easier to read.

None of these improvements require a kaizen event. As long as they do not substantially change the assembly process, these are “just do it” items … perfect for EK.

What about jobs in the office? Consider what the order entry person sees when she looks at her workstation. Just like the production assembler, she looks at the area through the lens of the eight wastes and value-added and non-value-added activities. What does she see?

Inside her cubicle are a computer and keyboard, reference files in desk drawers and filing cabinets, mundane items like the stapler, and product samples. She knows that for some common orders she regularly needs certain files, and it occurs to her that she spends a few minutes every day thumbing through her filing cabinet just to retrieve them. So she takes them out of the cabinet and places them in a holder on her desk. Then she talks with her co-workers and asks if a small printer could be placed closer to her desk, saving her 15 round trips a day. Sure, each trip is only 50 feet, but the travel time for all those trips adds up. Again, these small changes don’t require a big event or even a formal meeting. She can just talk with her co-workers, then make the change.

Making Everyday Kaizen Work

EK is about lots of base hits rather than home runs. What looks like a small improvement to the manager can be a huge improvement to the front-line employee. No improvement from EK is too small to celebrate. If EK really takes off, improvements will happen so quickly and frequently that you won’t know about all of them. That’s OK. If you create mechanisms so that you do know about every EK improvement, you’ll probably create a molasses-speed bureaucracy that will drag the EK momentum to a halt. Instead, keep it flexible and fast.

EK isn’t likely to happen unless front-line employees know that their managers are supportive and believe that the company is serious about improvement. If leadership provides the training and empowers the workforce, then the ingredients will be there to successfully deploy EK.

It is impossible to pinpoint how any one of these small improvements will drive a specific number on the financial statements, but collectively the improvements will affect the business. Employees also will become much more engaged; they will care about the success of the business. Employees can feel confident that they’re doing their part to make things just a little bit better for themselves and for the company. Hitting so many singles so rapidly, everyday kaizen can truly supercharge an organization.

Jeff Sipes is principal of Back2Basics LLC.